CALS Coordinator and Manager of TLP

Open Educational Resources (OER)

OER: Free and Open resources for the classroom

"OER are teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use or re-purposing by others. Open educational resources include full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools, materials, or techniques used to support access to knowledge." Atkins, Brown, & Hammond (2007)

On the left are links to Open Educational Resources (OER), such as:

Open Textbooks

Open Courses

Search tools to find OERs

Instructions on how to link to eBooks and journal articles provided by Meriam Library.

Why use OER?
For educators, OERs remove the legal uncertainty and the time and cost of getting copyright clearance for resources. It is easy to find free and open materials for your courses; many search engines now have plug-ins that limit results to materials with open use Creative Commons licenses.

OER are much more than just learning materials. They also now include open software tools (such as Moodle and Kaltura), and intellectual property tools (such as Creative Commons licenses.)

OpenStax textbooks is a leading provider of Open textbooks. All of their textbooks have Creative Commons "BY" attribution licenses that allow the books to be freely repurposed and reused, as long OpenStax is credited with a BY license.

News and Announcements

In May of 2017, the CSU’s Affordable Learning Solutions (AL$) program awarded Chico’s local Affordable Learning program (CALS) a grant for $15,000 for the continued support of Chico's Textbook Alternatives Project, or TAP. For more information on TAP, and how to apply for the 5th round of grant money, see the the TAP website.

For those unfamiliar with the Textbook Alternatives Program, TAP's primary goal is to encourage faculty to replace their high cost commercial textbooks for free or lower cost alternatives, such as OERs, library resources, digital textbooks, or self-authored content, while also maintaining or improving the quality of student learning. Our TAP program is part of our local Chico,Affordable Learning Solutions program (CALS), which is part of the CSU-wide Affordable Learning Solutions (AL$) program.